Exposing her body, revealing the nation: the carnival vedette, black femininity and the symbolic order

Abstract

This essay examines the significance of a ‘self-objectifying’ carnival performance that draws upon stereotypes of sexualized black femininity. The scholarship in this area has focused on whether performers reify or contest dominant stereotypes. I shift the lens from the performer to the audience. Specifically I examine fan responses to Rosa Luna (1937–1993), an Afro-Uruguayan Carnival vedette who became synonymous with Montevideo's annual Carnival from the 1950s until her death in 1993. In a nation that is Eurocentric, yet draws on aspects of Afro-Uruguayan culture for its identity, Rosa Luna became a national icon. Her performance embodied dual stereotypes of black femininity – the over-sexualized black woman and the black maternal. By turning to psychoanalytic theory, I argue that the performer is produced through the audience's desire. I suggest that the encounter with the vedette can be understood as a public ‘specular moment’ that activates the oedipal drama. Her performance reverberated with the symbolic ordering of sex, gender, and race hierarchies, provoking both the desire, and the disavowal of the desire, for black femininity. This insight draws attention to public performance as a site for the negotiation of desires that are structured through, and structure, hierarchical systems.

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